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Steven Holl’s New Houston Museum Building May End Up Looking Kinda Like This

Seen any images floating around of the new building Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts is planning for the northwest corner of the Bissonnet and South Main, next to the Cullen Sculpture Garden? Well then, this watercolor-and-charcoal “concept sketch” for the building by architect Steven Holl from a year and a month ago may interest you. It’s going up for auction tomorrow — as part of a fundraiser for the nonprofit Architecture for Humanity. Holl was selected from a group of 3 finalists this past February, beating out LA design firm Morphosis and Oslo’s Snøhetta for the MFAH commission of a new structure to house 20th- and 21st-century art.

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It may not be entirely clear from Holl’s drawing, but the new building will include a parking garage to replace the 2-acre surface lot currently on the site. It’ll face down the curved facade of the museum’s Law Building (below) — designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — across Bissonnet St.

Part of the plan should be to fix the crosswalk on Bissonnet. Completely nuts not to have decent lights on the north side of the cross so drivers can see people waiting to cross and then they put some view obstructing sandwich board in the middle of the crosswalk too. Geez, get it together.

@Purdueenginerd – why loathe an architect who actually gives you a challenge to engineer something worthy of a Purdue education? Can you not dream? Do you not yearn to utilize the latest engineering techniques and research? Must we rely on building technologies that have been proved cost-effective and relatively watertight by Walmarts? C’mon man – rise to the occasion!